Cata: Reforging caster armor

So, I got to play with reforging some yesterday on the Beta server. There are a couple things I want to point out.

First, it takes 40% of stat A, and turns it into an equal amount of stat B. So, if I had 92 hit rating on an item, it turned into 56 HIT & 36 haste (56+32=92).

So, reforging is not going to be good for healers to turn Hit gear into healing gear, because you would still waste an incredible amount on Hit.

Also, when reforging, you can’t turn a bad stat into a stat that is already on the item:

So, lets take my Frozen Bonespike here. It had 59 spirit & 59 crit strike rating that I could reforge. However, in the list of stats to reforge, I could not choose either spirit or crit. If the item didn’t have spirit or crit on it, however, I could still reforge into those stats. This basically prevents people from being able to over-stack in one stat.

I could, however, drop my hit rating pretty significantly by knocking down every item with hit or spirit on it. Being able to avoid having so many spirit & hit pieces, however, would be so much easier.

So, at a 40% conversion rate, Blizzard is still going to need to make some leather caster gear without spirit on it, so that moonkin druids are not constantly way over the hit cap, or they don’t have to reforge every item (since almost every item I was wearing had either hit or spirit, including a lot of my set pieces that now having hit rating instead of spirit).

Here’s what the reforging UI looked like when I chose to turn spirit into haste rating:

After you choose “reforge”, it would show up with the new stats in your inventory. My stat character sheet was a little bit buggy still, so they do still have some kinks to work out of the system.

While reforging is nice for minor tweaks, it will NOT be able to make up for a lack of well designed gear for each class & spec.

5 comments on “Cata: Reforging caster armor”

As far as I know, reforging will just slightly increase the number of items you might want to pick up – and make some pretty bad items less bad, though it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever really make up for bad itemization. Though it could ofc help if your regen is too high and you lack haste/crit or w/e.

One thing; is it possible do undo reforging or to reforge an item more than once?

Yes, you can undo & re-do the reforging as much as you want. You pay gold for it, but if the gold cost isn’t an issue, then (at this point), you can do it as often as you want. It’s just like enchanting or gemming in that way. You can always change your mind.

“While reforging is nice for minor tweaks, it will NOT be able to make up for a lack of well designed gear for each class & spec.”

I don’t think it was ever intended to make up for a lack of well designed gear fore each class and spec.

If I remember correctly reforging is intended to make bad items better, but not BIS. For example, lets say Haste is the best secondary stat for Moonkin in Cata (I predict it will be), but the items that keep droping for us are Crit/Mastery items. The ideal distribution may be Haste/Mastery but that item didn’t drop, so you take it and comvert the Crit to Haste to make it a little better.

There is also the possibility of allowing healers to use DPS gear or vice versa when an over abundance of one drops over the other.